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With the Supreme Court weighing the constitutionality of a central element of President Obama’s comprehensive health care reform, there’s a lot of talk (in the places where people talk about such things, usually unburdened by responsibility or firsthand knowledge) of making the court an issue in the campaign if it were to rule against the White House.

But here is a pretty good rule of thumb for Democratic Presidents: if it didn’t work for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four terms and a World War, it probably won’t work for you either.

In one of the rare political debacles of his long life, FDR overreached after his landslide win against Alf Landon in 1936. (Roosevelt carried every state, save for Maine and Vermont.) A largely conservative Supreme Court had already struck down key parts of New Deal legislation, and there was the threat of more anti-Roosevelt decisions to come. And so FDR proposed a plan that would have enabled him to appoint additional justices in an attempt to shift the court’s political orientation. The effort failed, miserably.

Justified or not, the Supreme Court has a kind of sacred status in American life. For whatever reason, Presidents can safely run against Congress, and vice versa, but I think there is an inherent popular aversion to assaults on the court itself. Perhaps it has to do with an instinctive belief that life needs umpires, even ones who blow calls now and then.

Ironies abound. One of the great partisans of the early republic, John Marshall, created an ethos around the court that has largely protected it (even from itself) from successful partisan attack. Even when it makes bad law (Bush v. Gore), it has the last word. Even when it makes decisions that enrage vast swaths of politically, culturally and religiously motivated citizens (Roe v. Wade), it basically has the last word. (If you disagree with this example, ask yourself how successful pro-lifers have been in amending the Constitution over the past 40 years.) It has had the grimmest of hours (Dred Scott v. Sandford) and the finest (Brown v. Board of Education).

The court is, of course, a political institution. In no way is it a clinically impartial tribunal, for virtually every decision requires an application of values and an assessment in light of experience. “Activist judges” tend to be judges who make decisions with which you disagree.

Wise Presidents have learned that taking the court on directly rarely turns out well. Thomas Jefferson cordially hated his cousin Marshall, but even Jefferson trod carefully as he repealed John Adams’ extension of Federalist judicial power. “John Marshall has made his decision,” Andrew Jackson is alleged to have said after a Cherokee case. “Now let him enforce it.” The showdown between Marshall and Jackson over the fate of Native Americans, however, was much more subtle on both sides, with Marshall characteristically taking care not to force an existential crisis with the executive branch. Segregationist Southerners may have put up billboards urging the impeachment of Earl Warren in the 1950s, but the chief justice’s job — and his place in history — was never in actual jeopardy.

On a human level, Presidents who have to fight and claw their way to shape public opinion, pass legislation and then try to implement their policies must be mightily tempted to make a hostile Supreme Court a target to energize the base. But history shows that Obama should resist the temptation.

There are subtle ways to make the point about a given court’s seeming hostility to your agenda and still win over highly informed independents in swing states who tend to decide elections. The big thing experience shows is that you should not declare war on the court. More in sadness than in anger, just mention the issues on which you feel stymied by the justices. From health care to campaign finance, those independent voters will get the message without being frightened off by an unsettling rhetorical attack on the judiciary.

That’s what FDR got wrong. Obama may well have a chance to get it right.